Adam Ant swans into his Kensington mews apartment an hour late, wearing motorbike leathers, a cigarette between his teeth. After numerous tribulations, he’s to make a dramatic comeback to music next month, with his first full tour in more than 15 years.

Fondly remembered for his swashbuckling run of hits in the early Eighties, such as Ant Music, Stand & Deliver and Prince Charming, Ant (real name Stuart Goddard) had fallen out of favour by the mid-Nineties. He drifted into acting, but then hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

In 2002, he was arrested when he launched a car alternator through the window of a Camden pub and threatened the people inside with a replica pistol. He was subsequently sectioned under the Mental Health Act, but on his release was sectioned again following another incident in which he hurled stones at his neighbours’ windows.

Only around this time did it become public knowledge that Goddard had a history of mental illness. At 21, shortly before his rise to fame, he had attempted suicide and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which has both driven and overshadowed his entire career.

He talks with disquieting candour about his illness. “I feel very grateful to be alive and well enough to make music,” he says, “because for a time there, it was like the Alamo. It really was. It got a bit sticky.”

As has been documented in tabloid exposés, TV documentaries and indeed his own autobiography, Goddard’s quest for success was a compulsion, pushed to extremes by his condition .

Initially, with his first, punk-era incarnation of Adam & the Ants, he met with rejection and failure, but, alongside a burly new guitarist, Marco Pirroni , he soon dreamt up a whole new vision.

“I was looking elsewhere, to the cultures of Native America,” Goddard recalls, “and combining that with that heroic piracy from childhood. Plus, my dad was a big reader, and into military history. So it all went in there.”

He emerged transformed, as leader of a self-appointed “wild nobility”, sporting David Hemmings’s jacket from the 1968 film The Charge of the Light Brigade, and a white stripe across his nose. Gradually, Britain and then America were gripped by Antmania, with Goddard cast as a modern-day matinée idol . “We brought back screaming,” he says with evident pride.

On a 300-gigs-a-year schedule, his bandmates faltered, but Goddard kept pushing forward. “Marco said he was tired, but he was only 21. Certain elements of drug-taking came into the group, which I wasn’t having, so I fired them.”

He quickly resurfaced, with Pirroni in tow, but 1982’s solo album, Friend or Foe, though playful, and massively successful, was also deeply paranoid.

Following 1985’s perfunctory and flat Live Aid appearance, Adam Ant’s single Vive Le Rock famously dropped down the charts, unlike those of his peers, and the ensuing decade was, largely, a nightmare of flops, unreleased albums and gathering stormclouds.

“I did three months on tour for [1995’s] Wonderful, with mononucleosis [a debilitating viral infection], which would kill a horse. I was hallucinating on stage. It knocked three years out of my life. One of the symptoms is depression and so that set up a scenario for me to do something really stupid.”

By this, Goddard means the downward spiral in his mental condition, which led to the incident that first got him sectioned.

“By then, I was in a state called hypomania,” he says, “where the batteries are down, and you’re not playing with a full deck. So I broke the law, and I paid the price. Like, 'Good, now leave me alone.’ But they don’t, that’s the trouble. Prison’s a walk in the park compared with being sectioned, mate, it really is.”

Goddard came out of care on anti-depressants, and, he says, he became addicted to them. “They stop you sleeping, so then you need a sleeper. I was given a drug prescribed for epilepsy – quite strong! They hand these things out like Smarties. If you read the small print of what might happen – every single thing that might happen, happened to me. I got cellulitis in my leg, because all that crap going round your system causes the veins to frost up.

“It may be a coincidence, but from the minute I took anti-depressants, I didn’t pick up a guitar or a pen for seven years.” And he concludes, with understandable acerbity: “You can deal with these things in other ways, not necessarily just the clinical cosh.”

During 2010, Adam Ant was reborn rather stealthily, popping up at numerous low-key venues around London, often unannounced . When I caught up with him at the Scala in November, he played a two-hour set of his early punk stuff, backed by a full band, and a bevvy of female dancers half his age. In the interim, the dancing girls have become his band, and they’re to tour the nation’s Academy venues next month.

A couple of years ago, Goddard gradually withdrew from antidepressants, and the songwriting came back. With help from Three Colours Red’s Chris McCormac, and Morrissey’s sidekick, Boz Boorer, he’s recorded a double album, which he plans to release himself in January 2012, entitled Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in: Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter.

“It’s a bit of a Sergio Leone job,” he says, with a flourish. “ 'Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter’ is a naval term for taking a beating, which I have in this life, so a lot of it’s about that. There’s a song called Cool Zombie, and another one called Shrink. I always like to tell a story. Gun in Your Pocket – that’s about what those menopausal, middle-aged pricks Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross did to Georgina Baillie.”

Baillie, the teenager at the heart of “Sachsgate”, is, it transpires, one of the girls in Goddard’s group, and she soon totters into the kitchen with her colleagues for a band rehearsal.

Goddard, now 56, is aiming high in his new incarnation . As he bounds around his cluttered sitting room, it’s hard not to be swept along with his enthusiasms. He talks of fronting an association for misdiagnosed bipolar sufferers, and of an album he’s writing for a third version of Adam & the Ants, which won’t include Pirroni (“He did something to me which I won’t forgive him for. I’ll never go on stage with him again in my life”).

It’s equally difficult not to worry that all this hare-brained scheming is merely a manifestation of the old “manic” self. Now he’s off the medication, can he cope with those desperate mood swings?

“I have a problem with the terminology. Black dog? Nuts? Bipolar to me is up and down. Who’s ever written a decent song about the middle ground? You’ve got to be crazy to be a rock-and-roll singer. Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard, Roxy Music or Ziggy Stardust, that’s not regular stuff. Your job is to take people out of reality” – he looks rather forbiddingly at me over his spectacles – “and that involves a certain amount of insanity.”